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Euro MPs: Evidence Of Israeli War Crimes At Jenin Camp
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Palestinian woman speaks about Israel’s atrocities to a
delegation of European MPs in Jenin |
OCCUPIED
JERUSALEM, April 24 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The spokesman
for a group of 19 Euro MPs visiting the West Bank said Tuesday, April
23, that the Israeli occupation army's assault on the Jenin refugee
camp "shows all the signs of a war crime," news agencies
reported.
Francis
Wurtz (Group of the European United Left), who heads a delegation from
nine parliamentary blocs representing 10 European Union (E.U.)
countries, said the situation was "totally intolerable,"
Agence France-Presse (AFP) recorded.
He
said the group had come to the West Bank to show that a "majority
of the European Parliament and of European public opinion harshly
criticize the policy of [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon."
He
said: "I believe that Sharon is a great misfortune for the
Palestinian people and the Israeli people. He promised peace and
security and he has led to war and insecurity."
Another
member of the group, Swedish MEP Per Gahrton described the camp,
devastated during a nine-day battle earlier this month, as
"ground zero; there is nothing left."
The
delegation condemned the "systematic destruction" of the
infrastructure in the occupied Palestinian territories, "the
humanitarian tragedy" and the gravity of the situation in the
region, calling for an peacekeeping force to be deployed there.
They
also denounced as "illegal" the arrest last week of Marwan
Barghouti, the West Bank chief of Palestinian President Yasser
Arafat's resistance Fatah movement and a leader of the Palestinian
uprising against Israeli occupation.
Meanwhile,
a Greek C-130 plane with 12 rescue workers on board was due to leave
Athens for the occupied territories early Wednesday on an aid mission
to Jenin and Nablus in the West Bank, the civil protection services
said, AFP reported.
"We
are expecting to get Israeli authorization, and it is planned that the
rescue workers leave on Wednesday morning," an official at the
service said.
Earlier
this month, the European Parliament adopted a resolution calling for
suspension of the E.U.'s association agreement with Israel and calling
for a United Nations-sponsored peacekeeping force.
The
delegation met Tuesday with a group of Israeli pacifists and with
Ahmed Qorei, speaker of the Palestinian parliament.
They
said Qorei expressed serious concern about the fate of Arafat, quoting
him as saying that "if the Israelis touch our president, there
will be an earthquake." He also called on the group to help the
Palestinians end the Israeli occupation.
In
Jenin, a British rescue team Tuesday left the devastated refugee camp
without finding any survivors in the rubble abandoning hope that any
might still be buried alive.
"We
have searched the site, and we are 99 percent sure that there are no
more survivors," U.K. member John Holland told AFP.
He
said the team, which arrived in the battle-scarred camp Sunday, had
interviewed 120 families who may have lost relatives in the course of
the ferocious nine-day Israeli military offensive.
Holland
said the Palestinian families have now either accounted for, or
uncovered the bodies of, all their missing loved ones.
The
United Nations is due to send a fact-finding team into the camp to
check out the Israeli "massacre" in Jenin in which
hundreds of civilians were killed. 
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